Pleased to Present a New Home for My Own Photography…

Hyde Fine Art

Economic, environmental and social evolution through fine art photography of the urban, rural and natural landscape…

Please visit and give me your opinion… are there any typos or aspects you don’t like?

Indian Creek Below Indian Valley, Sierra Nevada Mountains, California, 2009, by David Leland Hyde, Nikon D90. Prints of this photograph have outsold all other David Leland Hyde prints and Philip Hyde prints since 2009.

Dad gave me my first camera at age 10. At that time in the mid 1970s, my father conservation photographer Philip Hyde’s career, western outdoor recreation and the modern environmental movement were reaching new heights. Dad’s book Slickrock with Edward Abbey was also selling well, especially in California, the Southwest Desert and the Colorado Plateau states. Visit David Leland Hyde CV for more about what I was doing during this era.

My camera was a simple Pentax K1000 35 mm film camera. It was all-manual with no automatic settings. Dad gave me a good foundation for learning photography by teaching me basic camera operations and how to understand the relationships between aperture, shutter speed and film speed. I liked making photographs well enough. I made quite a few images on a number of different trips, but while growing up, to me photography was always Dad’s specialty. He had it covered and I had other interests. As a result, I went whole decades without ever making a photograph. I used my camera in high school a few times, but for school sports I needed a camera that could shoot on partial or full auto at many frames a second.

On a photographic trip with Mom and Dad, I made some good photographs in Yellowstone National Park, on the way home to California from my boarding school graduation from Principia Upper School near St. Louis, Missouri. On that trip, Dad and I photographed a number of national parks together.

In college at the University of New Mexico I tried to photograph the Albuquerque music scene and published a few decent images, but most turned out blurry or dark. One time I went to Arkansas for Spring Break and all of my photographs came out too dark because I used the wrong ASA shutter speed setting.

More than another decade later, after Dad passed on, I spent a great deal of time looking through his collection and talking to photography experts about what to do with his lifetime of work. While immersed in talking about images and selecting images with some of the best editors in the industry, my eye began to develop like never before. I started seeing photographs everywhere I looked outside of the studio: on drives, on walks, in unexpected places and in obvious places. I did some asking around about digital cameras and got a bit of guidance. One day in 2009, I just walked into Costco and bought a Nikon D90 kit with two lenses, a camera bag and an SD card. One photographer told me that it would make a good pro-consumer package to get me started. To see some of my early images and how I chose photographs for early versions of my portfolio, see David Leland Hyde’s Portfolio One Revisions and New Photographs.

My enthusiasm and diligence for making images grew in leaps and bounds. I have now made over 70,000 images since 2009. In the process learned quite a bit about Photoshop, but have just scratched the surface of what is possible with software, by choice keeping my workflow as simple as possible. I have made and plan to make more experimental work, but by far the majority of my images, certainly all but a few of my landscapes are single image capture, with only a few blends ever, no HDR, minimal masks, and only very small objects removed or altered in detailed retouching.

I use Photoshop for much the same purposes and to a similar extent that film photographers have traditionally used the darkroom. I do some dodging and burning, a.k.a., lightening and darkening. I increase saturation and vibrance in small doses and make minor layer and curve adjustments, much the way Dad used to balance the color when he handmade color dye transfer and Cibachrome prints. For more on how I work with images and the capture counts for each year, visit Best Photographs of 2014 and Favorite Photographs of 2015.

For an early version of my Artist Statement go to David Leland Hyde Archival Prints Pre-Launch. I plan to revise and update this statement some in the near future. Stay tuned for my blog project post in the next few weeks of my Favorite Images of 2016. In the meantime, please visit http://www.hydefineart.com/ and let me know what you think of it. Please let me know if there are any navigation problems, typos or anything else you don’t like. Enjoy browsing the various portfolios and watch for the new additions I am adding every week. Currently the site has just a few dozen images on it, but I plan to post at least 10,000 or more images in the coming months and years.

Hi George, glad you had your long writings edited. Everyone needs editing. I usually end up doing it for everyone else and often get paid well to do so. Funny you caught me right after I posted this. Often I just get posts up and then edit them over time as I look at them. Thanks for your input though, because I have now gone back over this again to make it better. I’m sure it could improve more, so let me know if you see anything.

Even though this blog is somewhat of a writing sample for me and a number of major magazines have requested me to write an article for them based on a post here, I still let it be a little rougher than my feature articles in industry magazines. I know you, George, are not writing what you have here just to be critical, but rather to help out. The main reason for doing all of this is to do a better job of communicating for the benefit of our readers. To give them what they are looking for, what they’re interested in, what they need, what solves problems and inspires them.

To answer your comment fully: thank you for the well-wishes regarding my website. As for coherence, I don’t believe that the readership here would have steadily grown, now in over 70 countries, nor would Outdoor Photographer magazine have put me on their masthead as a Contributing Editor if I wrote incoherently and was unreadable all the time. Four out of four of my recent articles for Outdoor Photographer ran as the centerpiece feature for each of the four respective special issues of the magazine. A great number of people have complimented me and praised the magazine for running those articles. Still, as you say, my writing is certainly not as good as it could be. I would like it to become “coherent and readable” enough to go well in the New Yorker or New York Times. In 2015 and 2016 I was turned down by both the New York Times and the Washington Post. The Washington Post sent me a note, which is more than most get, but you are exactly right. I will have to get better or get someone else to write for the major papers and magazines for me in the future. Thank you for reading my blog post and for stopping by. Best wishes to you in the New Year.

Thanks Gary. Coming from a guy who has been published in major industry magazines, writes an award winning photoblog and has a large, prolific website yourself, I take that as the ultimate compliment. Hopefully when I get a more significant number of images up, people will enjoy it even more.

Appreciate your comment, Crockett. Glad you see the energy of the site and photographs as positive and can feel that. In most cases, making each image certainly was uplifting, or the subject was chosen to make a statement of some kind. Glad to hear the energy translates. There’s a great deal of positive energy around all of the work that is developing right now. Hope you’ve seen some of my articles too. They’ve generated a lot of positive buzz and inspiration for people too, at least that’s what many have told me.